What area of the city offers buyers the best return for their investment? Without getting into the 89 mls sub-districts, but broadly looking at the 10 districts (areas if you are jargon averse and want to avoid confusion with political or other city drawn disticts) which one has performed the best? SF real estate statistics surround us like a sea, but are they useful?

San Francisco MLS Districts. Source: San Francisco Association of Realtors.

Our team just didn’t vibe with a company-made chart presented at this week’s sales meeting. Which got us digging into a bunch of charts and numbers and suddenly we were down the San Francisco real estate data wormhole. How often we find ourselves in this place. Or, well, at least I do. Here’s the company chart that we don’t vibe with (it seems to be this thing I do):

Zephyr’s Chart

Zephyr used a quarterly basis for their numbers with quarterly values calculated using 3 month rolling averages. And while I agree those are reasonable paramaters, I also disagree. I pulled number using both average and median sales price, but looked at the average or median sales price for the year. I used YTD 2016 for 2016.

I did this because our sales volume and velocity, as well as all the linked market dynamics vary a lot by quarter. To average out that variation, I’m more comfortable using the average or median sales price based on the entire year’s sales and not a rolling average from one particular quarter that has some seasonality bias for lack of a better made up term?

Zephyr dropped D8 and D6 becauase they aren’t major single family areas. Which is, again, fair. But they do exist, so we think the annual average is a reasonable compromise and our chart includes them.

Using those adjustments, we come up with our own chart below using median sales price:

Appreciation by District using Median Sales Price

Our chart, using median sales price, agrees that the Richmond (d1) area of the city saw the highest single family home price appreciation. Our data isn’t as optimistic on any of the neighborhood gains as the Zephyr chart, but we both agree on the first place area.

But if you feel like arguing with us, we’re one step ahead of you. We just need to use average sales price, an argument we could make because the annual average sales price uses amongst the largest data sets (all sales, all months) and thus is big enough to “absorb” any skewing by outliers and the neighborhoods areas are small and similar enough and homogenous enough in price that the mean average still presents an accurate picture of neighborhood price appreciation:

So is the Richmond the hottest market or the seventh hottest? Did it appreciate at 28% or 48% or 76% since 2013? We could argue about it forever. But remember: you can’t buy a neighborhood. You can only buy a specific home in it, so our suggestion is to focus most of all on a particular home’s unique value to your life. It’s an investment you live in.

The public urinal recently added to Dolores Park has received quite a bit of national media attention. However, for all that attention it wasn’t until I actually visited the newly installed pissoir in person that I discovered its most remarkable yet un-remarked upon feature: the view!

The view to downtown is amazing

The view from the Pissoir

Muni going by? Could be awkward…

Standing meditation or?

Just checking out those sweet puffy clouds

The public urinal (we agree with SFist on this one – let’s call it a pissoir) is located at the SW corner of the park near the intersection of 20th and Church streets. It’s the park’s highest point, and it has a phenomenal view towards downtown and the bay. Leave it to the national media to come and make fun of San Francisco and miss the fact that our drunken tech bros (but not women) will not only be urinating in public, but they’ll have a view while doing it that most people only see on a postcard. Sadly, we doubt they’ll remember it.

Joey Kahn, the department’s Public Affairs Manager, provided us with some key pissoir-factoids. First off: Yes, the thing is finished and plants will grow up around it to provide privacy soon enough.

“The plants on the pissoir will grow similarly to ivy over the next several months to provide for additional privacy,” says Kahn. “In addition to the 27 toilets (up from 4) we’ve installed at Dolores Park, the pissoir gives an alternative that is more civilized than urinating in public.”

The plants are apparently Trumpet Vines — and we will all soon know if they’re “urine tolerant.”

And if you’re feeling old school and think your bathrooms should have walls, take a look at all the bathrooms (not to mention living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms) that are for sale in surrounding nabes like The Castro, Mission Dolores, or Noe Valley.

Hopefully by now it’s no secret that Zephyr is our brokerage of record. Both Britton and I have been there since Day 1 of our respective real estate careers, and we have no intentions of going anywhere in the near future. We started at at our SOMA office (which is no more, don’t blame us) and when the recession ate that office up we moved to Zephyr’s founding location at 4200 17th St.

Zephyr’s new flagship office location

Zephyr will occupy the former Tower Records space

Street Level Entry to new Zephyr Flagship Office

Windows along Market St from Zephyr’s new flagship office space

I won’t tell you why we picked the founding office when we moved almost six or seven years ago, but I will say it wasn’t for the facilities. And it probably had something to do with convenience. Victorians often don’t make ideal layouts for living, and the layout for an office space can be even crueler. The meeting rooms often felt closer to interrogation facilities, and the furniture and color scheme, well… let’s just say WE ARE SO EXCITED ABOUT THE NEW ZEPHYR FLAGSHIP OFFICE SPACE.

The new Zephyr flagship office will combine Zephyr’s current two upper market offices (2500 Market St. and 43200 17th St.) into one space. The offices will be in the former Tower Records space, and will have a street level lobby as well as elevator access for clients and agents.

While we have no intention of actually paying for desk space at the new Zephyr flagship office, we look forward to meeting our clients in what promises to be incredible space. We think Zephyr has the best agents and sales managers in the business, not to mention the best clients! We are thrilled to see Zephyr finally find new office space in the upper market area for a facility upgrade that will be as beautiful as our clients are smart!

This morning, like the grocery geeks we are, Matt and I took a tour of San Francisco’s newest Whole Foods, opening next Wednesday, November 6. It’s located at 2001 Market Street @ Dolores, the site of the former S&C Ford dealership.

While the Safeway across the street continues quaking in its staid corporate boots, I’ll describe some of the unique features of the new Whole Foods.

Just to the left of the main entrance is a two-seat shoeshine stand, operated by a local vendor called A Shine & Co., adjacent to a wall of what our tour guide called “man products.” By which she meant “men’s grooming stuff,” like shaving gear and skin care. The shoe shine stand will be open daily until about 6:00 pm.

Now for some unique-to-this-store food items. Oh, Whole Foods, you had me at sausage on a stick, made in house and available in the grab-and-go section. There will also be locally made gelato with flavors like Blue Bottle Coffee (Ok, you had me at sausage on a stick AND Blue Bottle Coffee gelato). The bakery will put out mini foccacia in a variety of flavors daily.

Every Whole Foods has a hot bar, but this one amps it up with an entire section of the hot bar with all Paleo foods. If you’re throwing a cheese tasting party and you need 250 kinds of cheese from around the world, they’ve got you covered. They’ll also sell honeycomb from Steve’s Bees in Orinda and tell those of us who are unfamiliar with honeycomb how to pair it with cheese. Who knew?

Now I’ve got to bust on Whole Foods a little bit for a cake with a big ol’ carbon footprint. They’re selling cakes called Baum cakes and they’re flying them in from Denver. DENVER. That’s far away from San Francisco, even though a layer cake cooked in a rotisserie sounds really damn cool.

If you aren’t familiar with the proces so far, last fall the development of a draft conceptual design informed by community input and staff analysis started. In January and February of this year there were public workshops to get feedback from community members, neighbors, and local merchants on the draft design.

Based on that community input, SF planning went back to the drafting boards, and is ready to present their final conceptual design for the street.

Coming up on this Thursday, May 14 from 7:00 – 9:00pm the SF planning department will host a public open house at the Market and Noe center (2278 Market St. between Noe and Sanchez) to get feedback on the final conceptual design for Castro Street.

While I’m looking forward to the details of this proposal, the draft concept (6MB, pdf file) is big on increasing pedestrian flow and traffic calming. While a variety of solutions are proposed, the net result seems to be wider sidewalks for better pedestrian circulation, sidewalk bulb-outs at 18th and Castro, and the potential addition of several “mini-parks” that highlight various neighborhood locations of historic note.

Generally speaking, I’m all in for the proposed changes. The Castro neighborhood is an incredibly popular pedestrian destination, particularly with tourists, and I fully support almost any proposal that will make The Castro a more walkable location, particularly at the very busy intersections of Market and Castro and Castro and 18th Streets.

How would you like to see the Castro neighborhood change? What are your traffic calming ideas? How would you highlight neighborhood locations of historic note? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, and don’t forget to show up at the community open house this Thursday!

The chart above shows the median days on market for single family homes in District 5, broken out by neighborhood. As you can see, median days on market was down, sometimes substantially so… with Mission Dolores, Clarendon Heights, and Eureka Valley (Castro) being exceptional examples of how competitive 2012 was if you were a buyer.
The chart above looks at the number of single family homes sold by neighborhood in 2012. It is interesting for a couple reasons – it does a pretty good job of showing what neighborhoods in district 5 have single family homes (when we compare this with condos in the coming days it will give you a good idea of the types of housing that predominate any given neighborhood). Even though the number of sales was either up or slightly down year over year, we still saw a decrease in days on market, which is exactly what we would expect when demand exceeds supply.

Finally, the chart above shows the median sales price of a single family home in each of the district 5 neighborhoods. It’s no surprise that Clarendon Heights led the way with the most expensive median sales price, with the 2012 price being up both year over year and compared to 2009. Another thing to note is that some neighborhoods (like Twin Peaks) have very few single family homes, so small sample sets can lead to some erroneous conclusions… for example, that Twin Peaks prices are plummeting. I may try and get a post in this week that compares 2011 and 2012 single family home sales in Twin Peaks, to give you an idea of how small data sets lead to graphs like the above.

Happy Tuesday, I’m out the door for broker’s tour. I hope you have a great day!

About Us

Whether you're dreaming of your first home or planning for your next, we promise that you'll get the full benefit of our top-notch negotiation skills, industry relationships and market knowledge when you partner with us. Modern representation, even in Victorians.